Towards Restructuring the Congressional Committee System

Abstract

While the standing committee structures of the House of Representatives and Senate have functioned well for their legislative systems, some endemic problems remain. Because individual legislators have different backgrounds, interests and goals, and because committees have varying attractiveness for members, a natural selection process builds a distinct bias into committee assignments, overrepresenting those with special interests in the subject matter of the committee. Thus, rural legislators dominate the Agriculture and Public Works Committees; port area congressmen, Merchant Marine and Fisheries. The problem is especially acute in the House, where congressmen have only one or two committee assignments, and reformers have recently strengthened the powers of committee caucuses and subcommittees. Several large scale reforms are suggested to make committees more representative of the larger legislative entity and, thus, to improve the formulation of national public policy. For the House these reforms include: (1) consolidating standing committees to a total of seven or eight; (2) limiting the tenure of committee chairmen to prevent long term accumulations of power by small numbers of legislators; (3) rotating committee assignments to further ensure a wider range of members on each committee and to give congressmen in-depth experience in a larger number of issue areas. Formulas are suggested to limit the turnover on a given committee at any given time to protect expertise. For the Senate, a consolidation of both committees and subcommittees is suggested to give senators more flexibility to cope with a heavy and ever expanding workload.